A plentiful land provides for a plentiful table. The nature and variety of dishes found in Bengali cooking are unique even in India. Fish cookery is one of its superior-known skin tones and distinguishes it from the cooking of the landlocked regions. Bengal's countless rivers, ponds and lakes teem with lots of kinds of freshwater fish that closely resemble catfish, bass, shad or mullet. Bengalis prepare fish in innumerable ways - steamed or braised, or stewed with greens or other vegetables and with sauces that are mustard based or thickened with poppy seeds.
Bengalis also shine in the cooking of vegetables. They arrange a selection of the original dishes using the many types of vegetables that produce here year round. They can make ambrosial dishes out of the oftentimes rejected peels, stalks and leaves of vegetables. They use fuel competent methods, such as steaming fish or vegetables in a small covered bowl nestled at the top of the rice cooker.
The use of spices for jointly fish and vegetable dishes is fairly extensive and includes many combinations not found in other parts of India. Examples are the onion-flavored kalonji seeds, radhuni and five-spice or paanch phoron(a mixture of cumin, fennel, fenugreek, kalonji, and black mustard). The trump card of Bengali cookery almost certainly is the addition of this phoron, a combination of whole spices, fried and added at the start or finish of cooking as a flavoring special to each dish. Bengalis share a love of whole black mustard with South Indians, but the use of freshly soil mustard paste is unique to Bengal as it is used to make fish curry gravy or in the preparation of steamed fish. Mustard paste called Kasundi is a supplementary dipping sauce popular in Bengal.
Fish and meat
More than forty types of regularly freshwater fish are common, including carp varieties like rui (rohu), koi (climbing perch), the wriggling catfish family of tangra, magur, shingi and the pink-bellied Indian butter fish, the pabda katla, magur (catfish), chingŗi (prawn or shrimp), as well as shuţki (small dried sea fish). Chingri could be of varieties - kucho (varieties of shrimp), usual (prawns), bagda (tiger prawns), and galda (Scampi).
Shorshe Ilish, a dish of smoked hilsa with mustard seeds paste, has been an important element of both Bangladeshi and Bengali cuisine.
Salt water fish (not sea fish though) hilsa (hilsa ilisha) is very popular among Bengalis, can be called an symbol of Bengali cuisine. Ilish machh (hilsa fish), which migrates upstream to breed is a fragility, the varied salt contented at different stages of the trip is of particular interest to the specialist, as is the river from which the fish comes - fish from the river Podda (Padma or Lower Ganges) in Bangladesh, for example, is usually considered the best. To some part of the community, particularly from West Bengal, Gangatic Ilish is considered as the best variety.
Fried Rohu served in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
There are several ways of cooking fish depending on the quality, size, fat content and the bones. It could be fried, cooked in roasted, a simple spicy tomato based gravy (jhol), or mustard based with green chillies (shorshe batar jhaal), with posto, with regular vegetables, steamed, steamed inside of plantain leaves, cooked with doi (curd/yogurt), with sour sauce, with sweet sauce or even the fish made to taste sweet on one side, and flavorful on the other. Ilish is supposed be cooked in 108 distinct ways
Chicken is a late applicant into Bengali cuisine relative to mutton. Khashi, the meat of younger goats, is preferred.
The assortment of fruits and vegetables that Bengal has to offer is implausible. A swarm of gourds, roots and tubers, leafy greens, succulent stalks, lemons and limes, green and purple eggplants, red onions, plantain, broad beans, okra, banana tree stems and flowers, green jackfruit and red pumpkins are to be originate in the markets or anaj bazaar as commonly called.
